Police Officials Say no State Eyewitness Law Needed


	Police Officials Say no State Eyewitness Law Needed October 1, 2007 Columbus Ledger-Enquirer By Shannon McCaffrey, The Associated Press ATLANTA -- Georgia law enforcement officials on Monday warned a legislative panel against passing a law mandating how police must conduct eyewitness identifications, saying it could handcuff officers looking to solve crimes. Louis Dekmar, past president of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police, said law enforcement should study the issue and come up with its own guidelines. A state law would be too inflexible to be practical, he said. Dekmar, chief of the LaGrange Police Department, testified before a House study committee that is weighing whether Georgia should create rules governing police lineups. The legislative hearings come after six men in Georgia sent to prison on the strength of eyewitness IDs were recently exonerated through post-conviction DNA analysis. Questions about the reliability of witness IDs have also cast doubt on the conviction of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis, who was found guilty of killing a police officer. An appeal in his case is set to be heard before the Georgia Supreme Court Nov. 13. The House panel is hearing testimony about whether it is better to show witnesses photos of potential suspects sequentially, rather than all at once. They are also looking at whether the lineup should be "double-blind," meaning that the investigator running it should be in the dark about the suspect's identity. That would prevent any intentional or unintentional signals to the witness about whom to select. Two police officials who have experience training their colleagues on eyewitness techniques told committee members that the sequential, double-blind system is preferable. Sgt. Paul Carroll, retired from the Chicago Police Department, and Capt. Ken Patenaude, of the North Hampton, Mass., police Department, said that method yields fewer mistakes. "The goal here is to get justice and to get the right person," Carroll said. He said a police officer conducting a lineup "is going to smile like a canary when the victim of a heinous crime picks the right guy out of a lineup," but an investigator who doesn't know the suspect's identity would not. Showing photos one at a time means that a witness is more likely to compare the images to his memory of the assailant, the police experts said. When the photos are presented all at once the tendency is to compare them to each other, they said. Still, Carroll and Patenaude said they don't support making such standards law. They said the changes could be implemented through guidelines. Dekmar said the jury is still out on how the techniques advocated by Carroll and Patenaude work in the field. He said if case law changes after the state Legislature passes a law mandating eyewitness ID guidelines, lawmakers would have to reconvene to address the problems. That would be cumbersome since the state Legislature typically only meets for 40 days a year. "If we are talking about guidelines, you simply take out a page from the three-ring binder and replace it with another one," Dekmar said. "Everything changes when you start regulating the process." The panel is being led by state Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, an Atlanta Democrat, who introduced legislation last year to create uniform eyewitness standards. The bill stalled after prosecutors objected. Barry Scheck, the former O.J. Simpson lawyer and co-founder of the leading the Innocence Project in New York, is set to testify at the committee's next hearing Oct. 22. *Also published in the Macon Telegraph (GA), Rome News-Tribune (GA) and Access North Georgia (GA).
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